Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word - Monoskop

144 ORAL MEMORY, THE STORY LINE AND CHARACTERIZATION
the bard is original and creative on rather different grounds from
those of the writer.
Since no one had ever sung the songs of the Trojan wars, for
example, in full chronological sequence, no Homer could even
think of singing them that way. Bardic objectives are not framed in
terms of a tight over-all plot. In modern Zaïre (then the
Democratic Republic of the Congo), Candi Rureke, when asked to
narrate all the stories of the Nyanga hero Mwindo, was astonished
(Biebuyck and Mateene 1971, p. 14): never, he protested, had
anyone performed all the Mwindo episodes in sequence. We know
how this performance was elicited from Rureke. As the result of
previous negotiations with Biebuyck and Mateene, he narrated all
the Mwindo stories, now in prose, now in verse, with occasional
choral accompaniment, before a (somewhat fluid) audience, for
twelve days, as three scribes, two Nyanga and one Belgian, took
down his words. This is not much like writing a novel or a poem.
Each day’s performance tired Rureke both psychologically and
physically, and after the twelve days he was totally exhausted.
Peabody’s profound treatment of memory throws bright new
light on many of the characteristics of orally based thought and
expression earlier discussed here in Chapter 3, notably on its
additive, aggregative character, its conservatism, its redundancy or
copia, and its participatory economy.
Of course, narrative has to do with the temporal sequence of
events, and thus in all narrative there is some kind of story line. As
the result of a sequence of events, the situation at the end is
subsequent to what it was at the beginning. Nevertheless, memory,
as it guides the oral poet, often has little to do with strict linear
presentation of events in temporal sequence. The poet will get
caught up with the description of the hero’s shield and completely
lose the narrative track. In our typographic and electronic culture,
we find ourselves today delighted by exact correspondence
between the linear order of elements in discourse and the
referential order, the chronological order in the world to which the
discourse refers. We like sequence in verbal reports to parallel
exactly what we experience or can arrange to experience. When
today narrative abandons or distorts this parallelism, as in Robbe-
Grillet’s Marienbad or Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela, the effect is
clearly self-conscious: one is aware of the absence of the normally
expected parallelism.